NEWSFLASH – May 10, 2017
From: Roy Hanson and Nathan Pierce — Family Protection Ministries
This past February was Family Protection Ministries’ Capitol Day and Christian Home Educators Association’s Leadership Conference. Capitol Day has been held by FPM in Sacramento at the beginning of each new two-year legislative session for the past three decades. This year, CHEA joined us in Sacramento and hosted a homeschool Leadership Conference in conjunction with Capitol Day. An outstanding team of homeschooling families and homeschool leaders were able to join us making this year’s Capitol Day a great success.
The goal of Capitol Day is to provide information about private home education to our California state legislators and their staff in a friendly, professional manner. This also allows them the opportunity to visit with real homeschool families.
Our Capitol Day volunteers visited each of the 120 legislators’ offices, providing each office with an information packet about private homeschooling. These packets help explain private home education as well as provide research showing that privately home-educated children do very well compared to students from the public schools.
Capitol Day serves several purposes:
1. It informs this year’s newly elected legislators and their staff and reminds the veteran legislators of the benefits of private homeschooling.
2. It strengthens our working relationship with them on a professional level.
3. It leaves them with a way to contact us if they ever have any questions about home education.
This biennial event is especially vital for the many new legislators and their new aides who have not yet become familiar with private home education. In fact, a significant number of the legislators and their aides had no idea how private homeschooling works, either practically or legally, or that there are homeschoolers in their districts. These visits go a long way toward helping them see that homeschoolers are good, law-abiding citizens that are living and working in their districts.
This year we had some incredible opportunities. Wednesday evening we had Senator Joel Anderson and Capitol Pastor Frank Erb speak. On Thursday morning, Lance Christensen, the Chief of Staff for Senator Moorlach spoke followed by training with Nathan Pierce and Evan Pope. At the Capitol, Assemblyman Gallagher met with the group before we handed out packets and had a Capitol tour. On Friday morning, attendees had the opportunity to share their experiences with one another about their visits to legislative offices. We concluded with hearing from Legislative Education Consultant Robert Becker. Capitol Day was not only essential to informing our representatives about private home education, but it was also a fun and educational experience.
On Friday, CHEA’s Leadership Conference began as Nathan Pierce joined with other speakers, including Susan Beatty, Rebecca Kocsis, John and Shirley Calabretta, Mary Schofield, and Jim and Judy Davis. This was a very encouraging event focused on passing the baton of homeschool leadership to the next generation.
Our thanks go to all who participated in Capitol Day 2017 and to each of you who support our work. You will not want to miss our next Capitol Day, which will take place in early 2019.
We are continually working hard to preserve our God-given freedoms in the California Legislature!
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This Newsflash was sent out by:
Roy Hanson and Nathan Pierce
Family Protection Ministries
PO Box 730
Lincoln, CA 95648